It's been a considerable wait for Karen Russell to produce another novel since her first, Swamplandia!, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. Happily, The Antidote, a deeply imagined blend of gritty realism and alluring fantasy about the American Midwest in the Dust Bowl era, will amply reward readers for their patience.
On April 14, 1935--Black Sunday--a catastrophic "black blizzard" swept across the already beleaguered Great Plains of the United States. Russell's locus for her account of that devastating dust storm and its aftermath is the tiny fictional southwestern Nebraska town of Uz. Uz is home to bachelor farmer Harp Oletsky and his 15-year-old niece, Asphodel, who becomes his ward when her mother falls victim to a serial killer terrorizing the region. Another resident is immigrant Antonina Rossi, a "prairie witch" whose pseudonym provides the novel's title and who claims to store the memories townspeople share with her for a fee in her "Vault." They're joined by Cleo Allfrey, a young Black photographer who's been dispatched by the Roosevelt administration to document the farmers' plight.
Russell skillfully pulls back from the travails of her characters to excavate out of the formerly rich soil of this barren earth the story of how immigrants like Harp's Polish parents--fleeing German oppression in their homeland--ruthlessly displaced Native American tribes and then exploited the land in ways that set the stage for its eventual ruin. In doing so, Russell has created a tender story of how our memories sustain us in the face of significant loss and a frank reckoning with a painful period of American history. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer